Article

Time for an Identity Assessment Revolution

Our customers seem to have less patience now that their daily functions can be completed in the palm of their hand with a few swipes and clicks. They’ve come to expect the simplicity of buying a gift for a birthday party while at their son’s soccer game. Booking their spring break trip with their neighbors while out to dinner together. Securing an auto loan on lunch break and then heading to the dealership to purchase a new car.

As lenders, insurance carriers, retailers, and travel providers move to meet the demands of their mobile customers, they need to evaluate old identity assessment requirements and workflows to support these transactions. Competition is fierce, and customers migrate to who provides them the fastest transaction or credit decision. Orders, bookings, and applications need to be processed in seconds, minutes, hours, not days.

Absolute certainty about an identity’s legitimacy is no longer possible to achieve. Organizations must re-evaluate how they verify the identity of new customers to process a transaction or start the lending decision process. Then they need to map their customer’s journey and ensure identity assessment occurs efficiently at each touchpoint.

According to a recent report released by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), 2015 was the year of social security number breaches. This coveted PII data element was the target of 338 breaches, which involved more than 164.4 million records – half of the 321 million U.S. citizens. This is in stark contrast to the 160 breaches in 2015 involving debit/credit cards, which exposed less than 800,000 records.

Given the increase in breaches and compromises of personal data, the approach to just increase security doesn’t always work. It often doesn’t keep the bad guys out because they are sophisticated and find new ways in. The increased security measures annoy good customers causing them to look for other alternatives.

Whitepages Pro is a representative vendor in this report. We offer dynamic, non-PII data across web, mobile, and voice channels for identity assessment. The Gartner research note helps drive the strategic imperative to evaluate identity assessment in our new mobile environment. We hope you find it helpful and start the identity assessment revolution in your organization. Here’s complimentary access to this report.